Richard Curtis: Blackadder was lined up to be Sixties entrepreneur

He has blundered his way through four different centuries and Edmund Blackadder's fifth outing could have seen him return as a 1960s entrepreneur, writer Richard Curtis has revealed.

Blackadder did return for the millenium as an aristocrat with a time machinePhoto: PA

1:40PM BST 11 Oct 2008

Speaking at a special event to mark the 25th anniversary of the first Blackadder series, Curtis told how he and fellow writer Ben Elton had agreed to set the characters' next set of misadventures in the swinging Sixties if the series had continued.

Rowan Atkinson's eponymous antihero slid from being an English prince to a downtrodden captain in the First World War trenches, but the new incarnation as a wealthy businessman might have represented a rebound in the social fortunes of the Blackadder family.

However, Curtis revealed that one of the highlights planned for the series would have been the revelation that President Kennedy had actually been accidentally killed by Blackadder's sidekick Baldrick.

He said: "He was going to kill Kennedy and it would have been a mistake. We'd decided on the Sixties because it was such a rich period. It was a time of dodgy entrepreneurs with their fingers in loads of pies."